This semester I have been teaching 2 identical labs at BSU. One of them met from 10:30-1:15 and the second met from 1:30-4:15. Both classes feed students from the same sets of lecture classes. They were both a mix of men and women (but mostly men regretfully). But the students were very different from each other overall.
Ever since week one there have been some big differences about the two classes:
- The majority of afternoon class tends to show up a few minutes after the start of class.
- The morning class is asks more thought-filled questions.
- The afternoon class asks procedural questions.
- The morning class is engaged to learn.
- The afternoon class typically takes 25%-40% longer to finish a lab than the morning class.
As you can see here the afternoon students just aren’t as good as students. They just don’t care overall. There are a lot more math mistakes made in the afternoon class in basic math.
Why is this?
I have wondered this all semester long, and I have come to a few personal, non-scientific, conclusions:
- The afternoon students are lazier.
- I wonder if they are coming from lunch and therefore are in that “food coma” that can happen. I don’t get that, but I have heard of it.
- They don’t like being bothered and therefore wake up later in the day. May students talked about this during the afternoon class. They hated the idea of having to get up early.
- I heard many of them talk about how they use want to get through the class. This doesn’t set them up for success. More of the morning students wanted to learn and would ask questions that helped them learn about how to solve the questions presented in the lab.
- Many of the students want the answer told to them rather than finding out how to do it. That bugs me as a teacher and so I tend to leave these students frustrated because I ask them questions and make them work through it.
There are days I wonder if the majority of these students are just not as bright as the morning students. I Think that is a bit rough, but they haven’t shown me that they aren’t as bright as the morning students.
It sin’t even that the afternoon students are more social than the morning students with each other. Both classes are very talkative to each other. They spend time talking about classes and life outside of school all the time. I haven’t noticed more focus on getting the work done between the two classes. Both classes want to get the lab done as quickly as possible, it is just that the afternoon class just isn’t as capable in doing the lab very quickly.
IN the fall I am going to be teaching an even earlier lab class (at least that is what I am being told I will get to teach). I will be interested to see how those students fair compared to the other students. That lab will start at 7:30am, and I am curious to see if those are the really dedicated students or are they the ones that waited until the last minute to sign up for classes and as a result only had that time as an option. That could lead to very poor student performance, but it will be interesting to find out.
I will admit that my thoughts were all over the place on this one. I just struggled this semester with my two classes and how different they were to each other.
NOTE – not all students in the morning class were great, and not all the afternoon students were bad – this was just an overall average of the students.